Of Bears and Penguins

Advent Day 24,

In a few hours, I'll board a plane back to Dallas to spend the Christmas holiday with my parents. Tomorrow, I'll attend a church service somewhere. Mostly, I'll be with family.

I've been thinking about the Christmas Truce for the past several days. If you read about it in fiction, you'd think it was the most maudlin, farcical story ever made up - except that it's not fictional. It's truth. It happened.

In the trenches of Ypres, Belgium, mudlogged, flooded and cold were men that had come in July thinking, as it seems people always do, that they'd be home after a few weeks. But here it was Christmas Eve, and already the losses suffered by the British, French, Belgian and German arms reached numbers that seem impossible to conceive - above 200,000 men in the four-weeks of the first battle of Ypres. It must have seemed complete and utter madness.

But on Christmas eve in 1914, not at the bidding of officers, and not everywhere along the trenches, but in small pockets, the fog of madness lifted for the briefest moment, and the opposing armies began to sing carols in their trenches - answering each other. Some met in the middle of no-man's land, and exchanged such gifts as they had - food or tobacco. There is even an account of a spontaneous soccer game.

Then the moment passed, and the war continued.

Unbelievable.

I guess it gives me some hope that for those few hours the madness of violence and ill will ceased. Hope that there really are such things as redeemption, as peace, as reconcilliation, as an end to strife, and that they are not simply pretty fairy tales that we tell ourselves in order to go to sleep at night.

I saw a video the other day that had been posted on a facebook page for the church orchestra I was a member of in high-school. The video showed a kid who is a few years younger than me, in Army fatigues with a shaved head, wishing the church a Merry Christmas from Iraq. He was always a good singer, and in his mellow baritone, he sang "I'll be home for Christmas."

There's still a lot of soldiers out there on the front, in a wars that I remember hearing would only last a few weeks, but have taken up the better part of a decade. There will be soldiers on the plane I take home tonight.

War is a grave thing - always has been. I don't know much more to say about it then that.

I think perhaps the only thing to say is that once there was a Christmas truce.

And if it happened once, maybe it can happen again. I'll keep hoping for the day when we turn those swords into plowshares, and we wake into a sanity to last for the ages.